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Abstract

If the texts of both the Syrian Maritime Trade Law of 2006, which quoted the Hamburg Rules of 1978 Relating to the Transfer of Goods by Sea, and the texts of the UAE Maritime Trade Law of 1981, which transferred all of the Brussels Treaty of 1924 Relating to the Unification of Certain Shipping Documents, no longer commensurate with the technical developments in the maritime navigation and operations of maritime transport and legal developments, the Rotterdam Rules (Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea), represent a quantum leap not only in the field of maritime transport, but also in the field of multi-modal transport, because it avoided many of the criticisms that were directed to each of the Brussels Treaty of 1924 through its inclination to the interests of the carriers when the shortened time scale of the responsibility of the shipping carrier on the sea leg, and the Hamburg Rules of 1978 Relating to the Transfer of Goods by Sea because of its tendency to the interests of shippers, when it decided and set time scale in accordance to the agreement of the parties on their contract. Unlike the Rotterdam Rules, which extended that responsibility to the pre-and post-voyage, and organized some of the provisions of the multi-modal transport.

However, this legal issue raised our intention to look at a renewed knowledge of the legal texts that came in the Rotterdam Rules, where we discussed in the first part of the paper, the beginning and the end of the liability of the sea carrier in the pre-Rotterdam Rules. In the second part of the paper, the discussion moved forward to discuss a new principle of the beginning and end of the shipping carrier liability by Rotterdam Rules. Here, our question will be whether there is a good interest for the United Arab Emirates and the Syrian Arab Republic to ratify these rules, knowing that our findings in this paper concludes that these rules have created a sort of balance between the interests of shippers and the interests of carriers, unlike the conventions aforementioned, which they both tend to introduce an interest to one party over the other.

Finally, and through the deep research in jurisprudence of the United Arab Emirates and the Syrian Arab Republic, we found that a large number of jurisprudence have already used and adopted the Rotterdam Rules, such rules are in harmony with the international maritime trade requirements. Overall, these findings led us to encourage both legislators, the Emirati and the Syrian legislators to ratify these rules and take the initiative to adopt them in their own legislation, either by amending the current provisions of the applicable maritime trade law, or the issuance of a new maritime law for the reason that both states, the UAE and Syria considered as sea carriers.

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